Saturday, January 12, 2013

Web 3.0 - are we there yet?

We are now all too familiar with Web 2.0. It has been around for sometime, and we have heard a lot about how it has transformed the world of internet. Now, with the advent of HTML5 and the rapid developments in "rich media" and "responsive web", Web 2.0 already seems like a relic from the past. So why are we not getting to Web 3.0 yet?

Don't you know, Web 3.0 is already here! "Why did I not hear about it?" - you ask. Well...remember, Web 2.0 was more a marketing terminology than anything else. It was used to put a label to the state-of-the-art web at the time, it was a handle technology marketers could use. It was never really a "technical specification". So, though I find that in many ways, we are already into Web 3.0, we are still waiting for someone to turn on the marketing and publicity blitz to make us sit up and take notice.

Why do I say we are already into Web 3.0? Just as Web 2.0 was defined by a few major things - democratization of web, Asynchronous Calls (AJAX) and Subscription and feeds (RSS etc), Web 3.0 is supposed to be built on four key concepts - semantic web, personalization, artificial intelligence and "anytime anywhere" access. All of these are already available today in some form or other! Twine, which was first announced way back in 2007, was a good attempt at a semantic web. Though it did not succeed, it still laid the foundations. Today, many social networking and search sites use semantic search. iGoogle is the best example of personalization, and it is very much here. Artificial intelligence is evident in many of the features of popular sites, be it the graph searches of Facebook, or iGoogle, or Siri. And need I say anything about "anytime anywhere"? It is one of the most heard terms these days.

So believe me you, Web 3.0 is already here! If you are interested in knowing more about Web 3.0, this site has links to some wonderful material.

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